‘People are more pissed off than Olympia was hoping for’: Let’s Go Washington gets millionaires’ tax repeal on November ballot

Let’s Go Washington has officially gathered enough signatures to get the repeal of the state’s millionaires’ tax on the November ballot.

Brian Heywood, the founder of Let’s Go Washington, told “The John Curley Show” on KIRO Newsradio that, as of Tuesday, the committee has gathered 317,506 signatures. The number of signatures needed by July 2 was 308,911.

“The really interesting comparison is when we did the stopping the natural gas ban, the first four weeks we had 225,000, which was a blistering pace. For natural gas, we got 56,000 a week in those first four weeks, and here we’re doing 80,000 a week, and so it suggests something much bigger is going on here than I think Olympia planned on,” Heywood said. “People are more pissed off about this than Olympia was hoping for.”

Fight to repeal millionaires’ tax isn’t over: Heywood says voter confusion, turnout are next battles

However, Heywood said there is more work to do, noting that because the Legislature blocked the referendum path, the repeal effort had to go through the initiative process, which requires voters to vote “yes” to repeal the tax, a potentially confusing ask.

“They blocked the referendum, which is easy, vote no to vote no, right? It’s an initiative, which means you have to vote yes in order to vote no. In order to say, ‘I don’t want an income tax,’ you have to vote yes,” he explained. “So, I think the first thing is, we’ve got to get people to understand, vote yes, vote yes, vote yes, vote yes on this initiative, and that will take some money and communication and getting people out to hear that. Vote yes. What do I do? You vote yes, right? That’s the big challenge.”

Heywood also pushed back on those who cite election integrity concerns as a reason not to vote, calling it a “terrible excuse” and pointing to his own data showing thousands of initiative signers didn’t show up on Election Day.

“I hear people talking about election integrity all the time, and I have no doubt that there’s shenanigans and it needs to be looked into, but it’s a terrible excuse for why you shouldn’t vote, and it’s a terrible excuse to say why you should give up,” he said. “I’ve got numbers now on every county on the number of people that have signed our initiatives, who then didn’t vote. In one county, it’ll be 45,000 people signed, 20,000 of them didn’t vote. And I think the second piece for us really will be communicating with those people who took time out of their day and signed and get them to vote. So I think there’s a get-out-the-vote piece that can make a pretty dramatic impact here.”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

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